John Canzano, The OregonianAlfred Kangogo, 24, is a Kenyan runner who aspires to run at the 2012 Olympics. He's a junior at the University of Alaska-Anchorage and said, "My family was terribly worried about me going to the hospital, because where I come from, that means you are maybe dead."

They wanted his hip bone. If not that, maybe a piece of his lower leg. Alfred Kangogo had a decision to make, and never mind his Olympic dreams, because he was sick and this was real life stuff.

Said Kangogo: "My dream is my life."

This is how a man comes to find himself sitting on the fifth floor of a tiny hotel room in Portland. His jaw swollen, a tiny bandage on his cheek, his legs untouched and his dream intact.

Kangogo is from Kenya. He's 24. His parents still own and run a farm near the village of Kimmoning, where his five younger siblings still work and go to school each day. He hasn't seen his family in two years, and it could be a couple of years more -- all because of that dream of his.

First, though, that swollen jaw.

Kangogo underwent surgery this week in Portland where he had a golf-ball sized tumor removed from the right side of his jaw. Benign, doctors said. That's good news, but pre-surgery that growing tumor was causing discomfort and making it difficult for Kangogo to swallow.

Doctors said they would need to cut a section of the jaw off and bridge the gap with bone taken from one of his legs, and it's right about there where a man decides how far he'd go to do what he loves to do.

"Running is determination," Kangogo said. "If you are determined, you can be a great runner."

Kangogo is determined. He's always been that way. His parents' farm is six miles from the school he attended as a child. In the mornings, he'd run the six miles to school. At lunch, he'd run home during the break. Then, he'd run back in the afternoon, attend the final half of his day, before making the trip back home at night.

That's 24 miles, five days a week, and to this Kangogo said, "It's what everyone in Kenya does. We run."

He remembers world champion Kenyan distance runners visiting his village when he was a child. "People treated them like they were heroes," Kangogo said, "and I knew that's what I wanted to do."

So he ran in high school. And he earned a scholarship, and ran so well that he became an All-American runner at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. Right up until he noticed that lump on his jaw, Kangogo was running, determined to make the ultra-competitive Kenyan Olympic team in one of the middle distances for the 2012 London Games.

After that?

"I'll become a nurse," he said.

Yeah. He wants to be a nurse. In addition to being a three-time NCAA Division 2 All American as a runner, he also was an Academic All-American.

He'll become a nurse because he remembers waiting for hours at understaffed clinics in Kenya. And having to travel to major cities when family members needed something as simple as an X-ray because the machines aren't common in his country.

Kangogo, who has finished his junior year, understands that his calling is deeper than running long distances.

"I want to help people at home," he said. "They are so poor and need help."

Which brings us to the matter of his jaw and that potentially derailed dream.

Because Kangogo didn't give up the hip bone. He didn't sacrifice a piece of his lower leg, either. I suspect if he'd have never received an alternative, we might have found Kangogo in London a couple of summers from now, running with a tumor on his face. Instead, he found help. Kangogo and his coaches found a doctor named Eric Dierks, who has practiced at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center for two decades.

Dierks made incisions on the inside of his patient's mouth, not the outside. Then, he drilled away at the jaw bone, and sacrificed a couple of Kangogo's teeth. Then, he removed the tumor, and froze the jaw bone, and finally, filled the void not with Kangogo's hip bone, or a lower leg, as the more aggressive surgeons suggested, but with human cadaver bone.

It's controversial in medical circles. And Dierks knows he'll probably "have some discussion" with other doctors over the idea of treating the removal of a tumor delicately instead of going aggressive, but he understands what a dream means. And with a benign tumor, and the reality that removing bone from Kangogo's lower legs would cost him a dream, the doctor was willing.

"Here comes Alfred, who may very well go to the Olympics, and become a nurse," said Dr. Dierks. "When it comes to dealing with a benign tumor, the idea of treating it conservatively and preserving his dream was appealing to me."

We're told that our dreams belong to ourselves. That they're ours, and nobody else's. But then you hear a story like the one that featured coaches, and doctors, and you see Kangogo in the middle of all that.

If not for his dream, Kangogo medical treatment would have been straightforward. But in his village, and others like it, a dream is worth pushing the limits.

So here's hoping Kangogo's tumor never returns. That he graduates college, becomes a nurse, and returns to Kenya to help take care of his countrymen. But before that, there is the matter of Olympic Trials, and a chance to run for his country with those two healthy legs of his.